Cormac McCarthy Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver McCarthy, Cormac Biography of Cormac McCarthy Cormac McCarthy's work explores the darkest shadows of human nature, but McCarthy himself had a remarkably conventional childhood. He was born Charles Joseph McCarthy in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933. He later changed his name to Cormac, meaning "son of Charles," to honor his father. The McCarthys moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937. The elder Charles, a lawyer, took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority and remained there for the next thirty years. A number of key themes in McCarthy's works - like peregrination, the human affinity for bloodshed, and strained father-son relationships - are indirectly rooted in his formative experiences. McCarthy grew up Catholic. He went to church regularly and attended a Catholic high school. Then, in 1951, he enrolled at The University of Tennessee. He had only completed only one year of school, however, when he decided to enlist in the U.S. Air Force.

He served four years in the military, two of them on duty in Alaska, before returning to the University of Tennessee in 1957, where he found himself slowly gravitating towards fiction writing. After publishing two stories in the campus literary magazine The Phoenix, he won Ingram-Merrill Foundation grants for creative writing in both 1959 and 1960. Convinced of his potential, Cormac McCarthy left university in 1960 to pursue his writing career full time. McCarthy moved to Chicago and became an auto mechanic to support himself while he worked on his first novel. He married Lee Holleman, with whom he has one son, Cullen McCarthy. Soon after Cullen's birth, the McCarthys returned to Tennessee, and their marriage soon crumbled. However, his personal troubles seem not to have distracted McCarthy from his work. Random House published his debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965, which won the William Faulkner Award. In fact, William Faulkner's editor, Albert Erskine, edited The Orchard Keeper as well. McCarthy has enjoyed critical support since the beginning of his career.

In 1965, he won an American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship to go to Europe, and subsequently boarded an ocean liner to Ireland. On the trip, he met Annie DeLisle, whom he married in England in 1966. That same year, he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant, which allowed him to tour Europe with his wife. After traveling through England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, McCarthy and DeLisle settled in Ibiza, off the coast of Spain, so that McCarthy could finish revising his second novel, Outer Dark. McCarthy won the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. He moved with his wife to Louisville, Tennessee, where he fully renovated a barn to serve as their home. There, he leisurely worked his third novel, Child of God . During the mid 1970s, McCarthy also wrote the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son. In 1976, McCarthy separated from DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas. Perhaps unsettled by the changes in his life, McCarthy returned to a manuscript with which he had been struggling for twenty years, Suttree.

His perseverance was rewarded upon its publication in 1979 - critics hailed the book as his finest (some argue that he never surpassed it), and he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Grant. Meanwhile, McCarthy and DeLisle's divorce became official in 1981. If critical accolades had been a mainstay of McCarthy's career, popular success eluded him. However, with the 1985 publication of Blood Meridian, his work began to gain mainstream attention. Declared one of the best novels of the twentieth century by literary critic Harold Bloom, Blood Meridian perhaps best captures the bleak cynicism at the core of McCarthy's body of work. In chronicling the escapades of a young runaway who joins a bloodthirsty gang in their hunt for Indian scalps, Blood Meridian reveals the darker side of human nature, the inevitability of suffering and violence, and the tainted legacy of America's frontier past. In a rare interview with the New York Times, McCarthy seemingly rejects the possibility that human beings can ever change our aggressive instincts.

"There is no such thing as life without bloodshed," he says, "The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is really a dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous" (New York Times Magazine, 1992). One of McCarthy's better-known novels is the first installment in his so-called Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses . This 1992 novel also features characters who are swirling in the maelstrom of unforeseen, inescapable evil. Despite its bleak themes, All the Pretty Horse built upon the acclaim of Blood Meridian, garnering both critical attention and commercial success. In addition to remaining a New York Times bestseller for six months, it won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; critics were practically unanimous in declaring it the best work of fiction that year.

McCarthy then completed the two remaining books in his Border Trilogy: The Crossing (1994) and Cities on the Plain (1998), the latter of which unites the lead characters from the two previous books. During the same year that The Crossing came out, McCarthy also edited and released a play entitled The Stonemason, which he had written during the 1970s. In the late 1990s, McCarthy entered his third marriage (to Jennifer Winkley) while he was writing Cities on the Plain. The couple has one son, John Francis McCarthy. In recent years, Hollywood has taken an interest in McCarthy's work. A film version of All the Pretty Horses came out in 2000, but the reviews were mixed. However, his luck changed when the Coen brothers decided to adapt McCarthy's 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men , for the big screen. The film came out in 2007 and received a multitude of awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Road , McCarthy's 2006 novel, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006 and, in 2007, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. After that, The Road was also adapted into a film that opened in 2009 to mostly favorable reviews. A Blood Meridian film adaptation has been rumored to be in the works for many years, having attracted talent like Scott Rudin, James Franco, Todd Field, and Ridley Scott, but the project has not yet come to fruition. McCarthy rarely grants interviews and remains reliably silent about his work. However, he did concede to his first television interview with Oprah in June 2007, after she named The Road as her April 2007 Book Club selection. McCarthy currently lives north of Santa Fe with his wife Jennifer and their son, and he satisfies his interest in science by spending time as a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. In 2008, McCarthy received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

In 2009, the Guardian reported that McCarthy was currently writing three new novels, one of which takes place in New Orleans in the 1980s and will feature his first ever female protagonist. Study Guides on Works by Cormac McCarthy The Road | CormacMcCarthy.com The Road Amazon.com The Road Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods. Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt.

The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles—the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind. Through encounters with other survivors brutal, desperate or pathetic, the father and son are both hardened and sustained by their will, their hard-won survivalist savvy, and most of all by their love for each other. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. Passing through charred ghost towns and ransacking abandoned markets for meager provisions, the pair battle to remain hopeful. They seek the most rudimentary sort of salvation.

However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs. The Road was the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. The preceding précis is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Wallach. Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy | Books | The Guardian by Cormac McCarthy 256pp, Picador, £16.99 Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy's other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America. We can divide the contemporary American novel into two traditions, or two social classes. The Tough Guy tradition comes up from Fenimore Cooper, with a touch of Poe, through Melville, Faulkner and Hemingway. The Savant tradition comes from Hawthorne, especially through Henry James, Edith Wharton and Scott Fitzgerald.

You could argue that the latter is liberal, east coast/New York, while the Tough Guys are gothic, reactionary, nihilistic, openly religious, southern or fundamentally rural. The Savants' blood line (curiously unrepresentative of Americans generally) has gained undoubted ascendancy in the literary firmament of the US. Upper middle class, urban and cosmopolitan, they or their own species review themselves. The current Tough Guys are a murder of great, hopelessly masculine, undomesticated writers, whose critical reputations have been and still are today cruelly divergent, adrift and largely unrewarded compared to the contemporary Savant school. In literature as in American life, success must be total and contrasted "failure" fatally dispiriting. But in both content and technical riches, the Tough Guys are the true legislators of tortured American souls. They could include novelists Thomas McGuane, William Gaddis, Barry Hannah, Leon Rooke, Harry Crews, Jim Harrison, Mark Richard, James Welch and Denis Johnson. Cormac McCarthy is granddaddy to them all.

New York critics may prefer their perfidy to be ignored, comforting themselves with the superlatives for All the Pretty Horses, but we should remember that the history of Cormac McCarthy and his achievement is not an American dream but near on 30 years of neglect for a writer who, since The Orchard Keeper in 1965, produced only masterworks in elegant succession. Now he has given us his great American nightmare. The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, "each other's world entire". The initial experience of the novel is sobering and oppressive, its final effect is emotionally shattering. America - and presumably the world - has suffered an apocalypse the nature of which is unclear and, faced with such loss, irrelevant. The centre of the world is sickened. Earthquakes shunt, fire storms smear a "cauterised terrain", the ash-filled air requires slipshod veils to cover the mouth. Nature revolts. The ruined world is long plundered, with canned food and good shoes the ultimate aspiration.

Almost all have plunged into complete Conradian savagery: murdering convoys of road agents, marauders and "bloodcults" plunder these wastes. Most have resorted to cannibalism. One passing brigade is fearfully glimpsed: "Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. The phalanx following carried spears or lances ... and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each." Despite this soul desert, the end of God and ethics, the father still defines and endangers himself by trying to instil moral values in his son, by refusing to abandon all belief. All of this is utterly convincing and physically chilling. The father is coughing blood, which forces him and his son, "in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep", on to the treacherous road southward, towards a sea and - possibly - survivable, milder winters. They push their salvage in a shopping cart, wryly fitted with a motorcycle mirror to keep sentinel over that road behind. The father has a pistol, with two bullets only.

He faces the nadir of human and parental existence; his wife, the boy's mother, has already committed suicide. If caught, the multifarious reavers will obviously rape his son, then slaughter and eat them both. He plans to shoot his son - though he questions his ability to do so - if they are caught. Occasionally, between nightmares, the father seeks refuge in dangerously needy and exquisite recollections of our lost world. They move south through nuclear grey winter, "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world", sleeping badly beneath filthy tarpaulin, setting hidden campfires, exploring ruined houses, scavenging shrivelled apples. We feel and pity their starving dereliction as, despite the profound challenge to the imaginative contemporary novelist, McCarthy completely achieves this physical and metaphysical hell for us. "The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true." Such a scenario allows McCarthy finally to foreground only the very basics of physical human survival and the intimate evocation of a destroyed landscape drawn with such precision and beauty.

He makes us ache with nostalgia for restored normality. The Road also encapsulates the usual cold violence, the biblical tincture of male masochism, of wounds and rites of passage. His central character can adopt a universal belligerence and misanthropy. In this damnation, rightly so, everyone, finally, is the enemy. He tells his son: "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed by God to do that ... We are the good guys." The other uncomfortable, tellingly national moment comes when the father salvages perhaps the last can of Coke in the world. This is truly an American apocalypse. The vulnerable cultural references for this daring scenario obviously come from science fiction. But what propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy's late-English prose; the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway; and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiselled description. As has been said before, McCarthy is worthy of his biblical themes, and with some deeply nuanced paragraphs retriggering verbs and nouns that are surprising and delightful to the ear, Shakespeare is evoked.

The way McCarthy sails close to the prose of late Beckett is also remarkable; the novel proceeds in Beckett-like, varied paragraphs. They are unlikely relatives, these two artists in old age, cornered by bleak experience and the rich limits of an English pulverised down through despair to a pleasingly wry perfection. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms out-held for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle." Set piece after set piece, you will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised with disgust and the fascinating novelty of it all: breathtakingly lucky escapes; a complete train, abandoned and alone on an embankment; a sudden liberating, joyous discovery or a cellar of incarcerated amputees being slowly eaten. And everywhere the mummified dead, "shrivelled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth". All the modern novel can do is done here.

After the great historical fictions of the American west, Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy, The Road is no artistic pinnacle for McCarthy but instead a masterly reclamation of those midnight-black, gothic worlds of Outer Dark (1968) and the similarly terrifying but beautiful Child of God (1973). How will this vital novel be positioned in today's America by Savants, Tough Guys or worse? Could its nightmare vistas reinforce those in the US who are determined to manipulate its people into believing that terror came into being only in 2001? This text, in its fragility, exists uneasily within such ill times. It's perverse that the scorched earth which The Road depicts often brings to mind those real apocalypses of southern Iraq beneath black oil smoke, or New Orleans - vistas not unconnected with the contemporary American regime. One night, when the father thinks that he and his son will starve to death, he weeps, not about the obvious but about beauty and goodness, "things he'd no longer any way to think about". Camus wrote that the world is ugly and cruel, but it is only by adding to that ugliness and cruelty that we sin most gravely.

The Road affirms belief in the tender pricelessness of the here and now. In creating an exquisite nightmare, it does not add to the cruelty and ugliness of our times; it warns us now how much we have to lose. It makes the novels of the contemporary Savants seem infantile and horribly over-rated. Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them. While we can. · Alan Warner's latest novel is The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (Cape) Biography | CormacMcCarthy.com Biography Amazon.com Biography Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He is the third of six children (the eldest son) born to Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy (he has two brothers and three sisters). Originally named Charles (after his father), he renamed himself Cormac after the Irish King (another source says that McCarthy’s family was responsible for legally changing his name to the Gaelic equivalent of “son of Charles”).

In 1937, when he was four, the family moved to Knoxville, and his father became a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority (legal staff 1934-67; chief counsel 1958-67). In 1967, the McCarthys moved from Knoxville to Washington, D.C., where Charles was the principal attorney in a law firm until his retirement. Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. He attended Catholic High School in Knoxville, then went to the University of Tennessee in 1951-52. His major: liberal arts. McCarthy joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953; he served four years, spending two of them stationed in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show. From 1957-59, McCarthy returned to the university, where he published two stories, “A Drowning Incident” and “Wake for Susan” in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix, calling himself C. J. McCarthy, Jr. While at the university, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960.

McCarthy left the university again, this time for good. He went to Chicago, where he worked, apparently as an auto mechanic, while writing his first novel. He later married Lee Holleman, who had been a student at the University of Tennessee, and the couple settled in Sevier County, Tennessee. They had one son, Cullen. Some time later, their marriage ended. (Lee McCarthy is the author of several books of poetry, including Desire’s Door .) Before his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published (1965—McCarthy’s editor at Random House was Faulkner’s long-time editor, Albert Erskine), McCarthy had received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1965, using this money, he left America on the liner Sylvania, intending to visit the home of his Irish ancestors (a King Cormac McCarthy built Blarney Castle). While on the trip, he met Anne DeLisle, a young English singer/dancer working on the ship; they were married in England in 1966. Another grant was given McCarthy in 1966, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1966-68).

He and Anne toured southern England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Then they settled on the island of Ibiza, which was a kind of artist’s colony at the time. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of Outer Dark. In 1967, though, possibly at Anne’s urging, the McCarthys returned to America. They moved to Rockford, Tennessee, a town near Knoxville. According to Anne, the McCarthys lived in a rented house ($50 per month—to live at a pig farm). Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968. The reviews were again good, as they had been for The Orchard Keeper. 1969 saw the arrival of another fellowship, this time the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He and his wife moved into a barn near Louisville, Tennessee. McCarthy renovated the barn himself—entirely. Anne states that he added, among other things, a stone room and chimney. All the stones he gathered, all the wood he cut and kiln dried himself. Additionally, for his new fireplace, McCarthy salvaged bricks from the boyhood home of James Agee, which was being leveled to make way for downtown urban renewal in Knoxville.

Child of God was published in 1973. Inspired by actual events in Sevier County, it garnered mixed reviews, some praising it as great, while others found it despicable. From 1974-75, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener’s Son, which premiered in January 1977. This screenplay, too, was based on actual historical events; the locale was South Carolina. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. Anne DeLisle and Cormac McCarthy were separated in 1976 (no children), and McCarthy moved soon after to El Paso, Texas, where he lived for many years. They were divorced a few years later. In 1979, McCarthy published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book which had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty or so years. It was said by many to be McCarthy’s best work to date, and some critics still maintain that it is his finest novel. However, the book drew some negative reviews, too.

At least one reviewer (who wrote for the Memphis Press Scimitar) was roundly rebuked in a letter to the editor written by novelist and historian Shelby Foote. 1981 brought another grant to McCarthy’s door (or, more literally, to McCarthy’s room in a motel run by a friend in Knoxville), this time a MacArthur Fellowship—one of their so-called genius grants. McCarthy used this money to live on while writing his next novel, an apocalyptic western set in Texas and Mexico during the 1840s and based heavily on actual historical events. Blood Meridian was published in 1985, but received little review attention at the time. Now, however, it is considered a turning point in his career. Some critics prefer his recent western writing, of which Blood Meridian was the first example. Others feel that he has strayed too far from his roots, that his westerns lack something. But Blood Meridian, followed closely by Suttree, is now generally regarded as McCarthy’s finest work to date. McCarthy did extensive research for the novel. The author visited all the locales of the book and even learned Spanish to further his research.

After the retirement of Albert Erskine, McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf. There, under the editorial advisement of Gary Fisketjon, McCarthy began to get exposure. In connection with the book’s publication and as a favor to his retiring editor Albert Erskine, he granted The New York Times Magazine the sole interview [link requires registration] to which (at that time) he had ever submitted. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. Unlike McCarthy’s earlier books, this one became a publishing sensation, garnering many excellent reviews. It became a New York Times bestseller, and sold 190,000 copies in hardcover within the first six months of publication. It finally gave McCarthy the wide readership that had eluded him for many years. McCarthy used the money he had made from All the Pretty Horses to buy a new pickup truck. He kept on writing. McCarthy edited and revised a play he had written in the mid-1970s, which was published in the summer of 1994 by Ecco Press.

Called The Stonemason, the tragedy explores the fortunes of three generations of a black family in Kentucky. Shortly after the publication of The Stonemason, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing. It began life with a first printing of 200,000 copies, a large printing for a work of literary fiction. Sales were brisk enough to justify the second printing of 25,000 more copies before the end of the first month after publication. The book features the tale of Billy Parham’s attempt to return a trapped she-wolf to its home in the northern Mexican mountains and the tragic consequences of his adventure. The third volume of The Border Trilogy was published in 1998; Cities of the Plain unites John Grady Cole, the main character of All the Pretty Horses, with The Crossing‘s Billy Parham, and centers on Cole’s doomed relationship with a Mexican prostitute.

Not as well-received by critics as the first two books in the Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain is nonetheless notable for its epilogue, which reaches back to Suttree in its imagery and simultaneously casts the entire Border Trilogy in a new and fascinating light, unifying the previous two volumes of the trilogy. Sometime around the publication of Cities of the Plain, McCarthy married for a third time; he and his wife Jennifer Winkley have one child, John Francis, born 1999. The McCarthys have also moved from El Paso; they now reside in Tesque, New Mexico, on the outskirts of Santa Fe. McCarthy has taken a position as writer in residence with the Santa Fe Institute. 2005 brought the publication of No Country for Old Men, which was adapted into an award-winning film by Joel and Ethan Coen. In 2006, Alfred A. Knopf published The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. McCarthy granted an interview with Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen The Road for her Book Club. The Road was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Literature, and it also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

The Sunset Limited arrived in 2006. Commissioned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, it premiered in May, with publication thereafter. The play takes place in a shabby tenement apartment, where Black (a former convict) and White (a university professor) discuss “big questions” about God, faith, life, and death following Black’s saving White, who had attempted to commit suicide by jumping in front of an oncoming subway train. HBO subsequently produced a successful adaptation of The Sunset Limited starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones (directed by Jones). Early 2013 brought the announcement that McCarthy had penned an original screenplay, The Counselor. Little is currently known about the screenplay, but Ridley Scott directed, and the film is slated for U.S. release in October of 2013. The story apparently deals with territory and themes similar to that explored in No Country for Old Men. Except for a few odds and ends (his favorite novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick; he doesn’t care for the work of Henry James, he doesn’t like to talk about writing, etc.), that’s more or less what we know about Cormac McCarthy.

The Cormac McCarthy Society respects the author’s clearly expressed desire for privacy. If you wish to contact him, please write to Mr. McCarthy care of his agent: c/o Amanda Urban Cormac McCarthy - Author, Playwright - Biography.com Cormac McCarthy Cormac McCarthy is an American writer known for stylistically complex novels, such as The Road and Blood Meridian. IN THESE GROUPS Famous People Named McCarthy Synopsis Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933 and published his first novel (The Orchard Keeper) in 1965. What followed was a string of stylistically complex and dark novels, such as Outer Dark and Suttree, that established McCarthy as both a bright literary light and a master of the Southern Gothic novel. With 1985's Blood Meridian, McCarthy became a modern master, and his Border Trilogy enthralled both critics and a growing readership. With such later novels as No Country for Old Men and The Road, McCarthy found even wider success, and film versions of the books put his name on the lips of moviegoers around the world. Early Years Cormac McCarthy was born Charles McCarthy Jr.

on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the eldest son of six children (he later changed his name to Cormac, after an Irish king). In 1937, his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. After graduating from high school, he went to the University of Tennessee but left in 1953 to join the U.S. Air Force, where he served for four years. McCarthy returned to UT in 1957 and began what would become an illustrious writing career when he published two stories, "A Drowning Incident" and "Wake for Susan," in the student literary magazine. Also notable of his time at UT, McCarthy won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in both 1959 and 1960. The early 1960s found McCarthy in Chicago, working on his first novel and marrying a student he had met while at UT, Lee Holleman. The couple had one son, Cullen, before their marriage came to an end.

(McCarthy would marry twice more, to Anne DeLisle in 1966, and to Jennifer Winkler in l998.) The Early Novels His first book, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965 to mixed reviews but garnered McCarthy the William Faulkner Award. McCarthy soon won a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and set sail for Europe. He met Anne DeLisle on board the ship, and he and DeLisle traveled the continent for the next couple of years. They returned to Tennessee in 1967, and Outer Dark was published the following year. What followed these two dark and complex novels were two more that lived in the Southern Gothic realm and helped build McCarthy's reputation as a literary heavyweight: Child of God (1974) and Suttree (1979), which some contend is his greatest work. The novels were about people on the outskirts of society, looking into themselves, working through seemingly endless dark nights of the soul.

Later Novels In 1985, Blood Meridian, a hyper-violent and apocalyptic frontier tale set in the 1840s, was published to critical acclaim (although little excitement from the general reading public) and has since been hailed as his masterpiece. Telling the story of a 14-year-old boy, the Kid, who joins a gang of Indian hunters along the U.S.–Mexico border, the work allowed McCarthy to explore the nature of good and evil in a way that would redefine his writing and truly tip the scales on his growing status. In 1992, McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses was published. This book would be his first real breakthrough to a wide readership, selling nearly 200,000 copies in the first hardcover printing. It also won the National Book Award and paved the way for two more novels in the "Border Trilogy": The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998).

After the turn of the 21st century, McCarthy began entering the mainstream consciousness even more with such works as No Country for Old Men (2005), which was turned into an Oscar-winning film two years later, and The Road (2006), an end-of-the-world father/son tale that won the Pulitzer Prize that year and also went on to the big screen. In 2013, two more of his works moved toward movie theaters, with James Franco's adaptation of Child of God and Ridley's Scott's The Counselor, for which McCarthy wrote his first original screenplay. Besides the Pulitzer, McCarthy has won a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation Grant. Fact Check We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us ! Citation Information The Road Study Guide | GradeSaver The Road Study Guide Buy Study Guide The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy 's most recent novel, describes the bleak journey of a father and son across a post-apocalyptic American landscape.

He was visiting El Paso, Texas, with one of his sons, John Francis McCarthy, in 2003 when the initial idea for The Road was born: McCarthy envisioned how the city would look in the future. McCarthy dedicated this novel to John. The novel has met with great critical success, including a Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Many critics and scholars herald The Road as one of McCarthy's best works--if not his masterpiece. Extensive praise for The Road can be found on his publisher's (Random House's) webpage for the novel . Oprah Winfrey selected The Road for her Book Club in April 2007, which led to McCarthy's first televised interview on her program later that year. McCarthy's literary repertoire includes revisions of various genres, including the crime thriller ( No Country for Old Men ) and the Western (the Border Trilogy). Some readers entertain an ongoing debate regarding whether The Road should be classified as fiction, science fiction, or even horror, given McCarthy's brutal prose and unflinchingly vivid vision of what could be considered a hell on earth.

Nonetheless, most agree that The Road is a deeply moving, if also deeply disturbing, work of unparalleled literary genius that transcends any discussion of genre. Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy | Books | The Guardian by Cormac McCarthy Picador, £16.99, pp241 If culture has a foundation stone, it must be the denial of death. Attempts to confront the void so often seem hollow. Even Philip Roth's Everyman, about the inevitable end of an averagely privileged American life, didn't quite come off, for all the author's brilliance and willpower. The imagination can't entirely pull up its roots in wish-fulfilment. Yet somehow, Cormac McCarthy's new novel, conjuring up the end not of an individual but of all humanity, feels very real. Death comes close. A man and his young son make their slow way across a blasted landscape towards the sea. Theirs is a rodent life of hiding and scavenging. They follow the road, but sleep out of sight of it whenever they can. Other human beings have nothing to offer but cruelty and danger. The father creeps out of the boy's earshot at night when he has a coughing fit.

For all practical purposes, the world came to an end some years before in what was presumably a nuclear war, although those words are not used. The dead are unburied and thousands of mummified corpses can be seen still stuck in the tar of the roads that melted round them as they tried to escape. The boy was not yet born then, though he was well on the way. It isn't certain that he remembers his mother. Now the sun hardly shows its face and nothing grows. The man has to explain the phrase 'as the crow flies' to his son, in the absence of crows or anything else that flies. Without vitamin D in pill form, the boy will get rickets. There's rarely a roof over his head, so he's out in all weathers, but the sun no longer plays its part in the old bargain of outdoor lives and healthy bones. The only food to be had for the dwindling bands of survivors is tinned - and miraculously undiscovered by all the other scavengers - or else human. The Road isn't a fable, or a prophesy, or even a tract in the manner of Shute's On the Beach.

It's a thought and feeling experiment, bleak, exhilarating (in fact, endurable) only because of its integrity, its wholeness of seeing. The man pushing his shopping cart towards nothing hopeful, boxing the compass of despair, makes Brecht's Mother Courage seem downright fortunate in the choices she must make. There's one literary figure who seems to have a copyright on desolation and futility, who wrote about last things almost from the first, Samuel Beckett. Eschatology was mother's milk to him. There's one episode in The Road which comes uncomfortably close to Beckett's style, but otherwise, McCarthy steps out of that coldly consoling shadow and dares to overturn Beckett's aesthetic choices. The Beckettian passage is one where the man and boy encounter an old man tapping his way along with a stick. He claims he knew what was coming: 'People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt [sic] believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt [sic] getting ready for them.

It didnt [sic] even know they were there.' In this rare bit of a dialogue with a stranger, there's a sense of play-acting, even pleasure in the exchange of profound platitudes: 'Do you wish you would die?/ No. But I might wish I had died. When you're alive you always got that ahead of you./ Or you might wish you'd never been born./ Well. Beggars cant [sic] be choosers./ You think that would be asking too much./ What's done is done. Anyway, it's foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these.' Still, the Irish existential flavour here ('There is no God and we are his prophets') is a little strong. McCarthy has his own idea of thrift, as he shows with his eccentric rationing of punctuation (dont, musnt, wasnt), but he reverses the linguistic parsimoniousness of the master. Beckett's late style was very pared down, but McCarthy reverts to a poetic register closer to Yeats: 'All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain,' for example.

This turning back of the clock may seem irrational and even reactionary, but it has its own logic. If writing must always bear some relationship to beauty (and Beckett's has a great, mineral beauty), if you can only limit the play of connotation but not eliminate it, why bother to try? There's more bad faith in an artificial rigour than in the richness of language through which desolation filters here. Language takes the edge off. That's obviously true of a fin de siecle-sounding sentence such as: 'By day, the banished Sun circles the Earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.' But it's also true of: 'They plodded on, thin and filthy as street addicts.' Street addicts at least have the possibility of begging from those better off. There are none now better off. It's even true of: 'He looked like something out a death camp', since the whole earth is now a death camp, one with no guards, only inmates. In this extremity, there are more words than things, as the world shrinks down around 'a raw core of parsible entities'.

This new world even fits the pattern of American pastoral - a wilderness and no women - though nature can provide no more than the occasional mushroom or some desiccated apples hidden in the dead grass of a dead orchard. Part of the achievement of The Road is its poetic description of landscapes from which the possibility of poetry would seem to have been stripped, along with their ability to support life. The 'sacred idiom shorn of its referents' must die in its turn, but before then, it is entitled to one last flight, like the flocks of migratory birds the man heard once in the early days of the post-world, their half-muted crankings miles above him in the bitter dark, when 'he wished them Godspeed until they were gone'. · To order The Road for £15.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885

Question: Who wrote the 2006 novel The Road?
Answer: Cormac McCarthy